Reading

Intent

At St Michael’s Junior School, we aim to develop children into enthusiastic readers who value reading as a key life skill. We are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers and we believe reading is key for academic success. Regardless of background, ability or additional needs, we want all children to become fluent confident readers who enjoy the reading experience. The development of curiosity, creativity, challenge and independence runs through the core of our learning intentions.

Children will be competent in the arts of speaking and listening. From our younger children using language to express themselves and extending their vocabulary to older children articulating their thought processes and reasoning, including speaking to an audience.

Our aim is to provide children with the key reading skills to build on year-on-year, that can be used and developed throughout each phase of their education and prepare them for the junior school. This begins within the first week of the children starting school! Please see our ELS phonics page on the school website for more information on how we teach phonics.

We aim to ensure all children understand what they are reading and enhance and deepen their comprehension skills, beginning their pathway to independence and becoming fluent readers.

Implementation

Reading is a key skill necessary to access learning across all areas of the curriculum. A range of genres of text are included across the curriculum to ensure a wide range of skill and a broad knowledge and understanding is developed. We aim for all children to have lots of story reading experiences, reading a wide variety of genres and text types. This in turn will create a wide and varied bank of vocabulary and language for children to apply to their own compositions. Staff will model reading strategies through sharing class stories, encouraging a love of literature, an enjoyment of reading for pleasure and igniting their curiosity. We use discussion in our daily 'Book Club' sessions in order to learn; children will be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and opinions.

The objectives of the Early Years and national curriculum are followed closely and have been embedded into the St Michael’s reading progression document. Lessons inspire children’s curiosity and creativity, embedding their skills into memory and then enabling them to apply their knowledge independently when completing a variety of reading tasks.

Impact

Reading assessment is ongoing in every ‘Book Club’ lesson through verbal feedback and class discussion. Through verbal feedback pupils are given detailed responses and next steps in order to develop each child personally, and provide all children with opportunities to edit and improve their understanding. Children’s reading comprehension is assessed against the National Curriculum objectives to infer their next steps, consolidate children’s understanding of specific objectives and challenge pupils to achieve even higher. These assessments are completed through a variety of different tasks, including formal reading comprehension tasks. ELS Phonics Assessment (YR/Y1) and Accelerated Reader STAR reading tests (Y2)  also aid the assessment of children’s overall understanding of reading skills. All children will be monitored and assessed at different levels to ensure a rigorous, robust and progressive curriculum meeting the needs of all children.

The effective planning of the activities, targeted support and appropriate challenge in literacy activity lessons ensures that all children are able to meet their full potential.

Pupil voice is used to enable class teachers and school leaders to assess the impact and enjoyment of reading across the curriculum. Self and peer assessment is also embedded into daily practice to give the children opportunities to discuss their own reading and understanding.

The senior leadership team closely monitors all children’s books and holds pupil progress meetings each term to monitor every child’s individual learning needs and progress in reading.